The prosody of interrogative sentences in Yakut language

NORTH-EASTERN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY













The prosody of interrogative sentences in Yakut language

A Thesis

By

Anna Samsonova

Department of Interpretation and Translation

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements 

for degree of 

Master of Art





June 1, 2017







Accepted by the Graduate School

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Date,           Dean of the Graduate School





The undersigned have examined the thesis entitled «The prosody of interrogative sentences in Yakut language» presented by Anna Samsonova, a candidate for the degree of Masterof  Art and hereby certify that is worthy of acceptance.







	

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Philippe Martin for the useful comments, remarks and engagement through the learning process of this master thesis.During working on this problem. Also, I’m grateful to his for careful reading and for many helpful suggestions towards making it more readable. 

Also, I like to thank the participants in my experimental, who have willingly shared their precious time during the process of my research.

I am grateful to Professor Ahn for his encouragement and practical advice. His wisdom, knowledge and commitment to the highest standards inspired and motivated me.

My parents and my brother, have supported me both as family and as occasional linguistic informants. I owe them many things beyond this dissertation.

































ABSTRACT

This thesis investigates the prosody of interrogative sentences in Yakut language. Analyzed collection of utterances spoken interrogative sentences by 4 speakers and use 23 interrogative sentences. 

This thesis examines some aspects of the prosody of Yakut language. This is done with the help of results of experiments which especially addressed this issue. In this paper attempt to formalize the properties of the prosodic structure and define its relationship with interrogative sentence applied in Yakut language. Research in the prosody of interrogative sentences, as well as experiments on speech production, suggesting that segmental and super segmental processes are not governed by syntactic structure. Rather, these processes reflect an independent prosodic structure, which includes prosodic categories such as metrical foot, prosodic word, and phonological phrase. Analysis indicate that speakers use the particle in interrogative sentences and boundaries are influenced by prosodic word and phonological phrase boundaries. Thus, it appears that interrogative sentences create prosodic structures similar to those proposed in theories of prosodic phonology.

The work is an experimental-linguistic study interrogative sentences of the Yakut language.

The problem of the prosodic structure in Yakut language attracts many researchers and studied by philologists, psycho- and socio-linguists. The increased interest in this problem is explained not only by the desire to consider speech constructions, but also by the need to make theoretical deifications in the prosodic structure of interrogative sentences the Yakut language.

The relevance of the topic of this study is determined on the one hand by the fact that its main tasks in the Yakut philology are solved in the context of modern requirements in theory of speech communication, and on the other hand as a common intonation system of the Yakut speech established during a long historical development.













TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEGMENTS………………………………………………………………………….3

ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………….….…..4

TABLE OF CONTENTS………………………………………………………………………….5

LIST OF GLOSSES…………………………………………………………………………….…6

LIST OF TABLES……………………………………………………………………………..….7

LIST OF FIGURES……………………………………………………………………………..…8

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………....…9

The purpose…………………………………………………………………………………...9

 Organization…………………………………………………………………………...…….11

CHAPTER 2. BACKGROUND AND LITERATURE……………………………………….....12

2.1. Overview of theoretical literature………………………………………………………..…..12

2.2. Prosodic Structure…………………………………………………………………………...15

2.3. Intonation……………………………………………………………………………………16

2.4. Typical characteristics of interrogative sentences……………..……………………………22

CHAPTER 3: EXPLORING OF INTERROGATIVE PROSODY IN YAKUT LANGUAGE…26

3.1. Methods …………………………………………………………..…………….………...…26

3.2. Corpus of Yakut interrogative sentences …………………………………………………....28

3.3. Intonation analyses.……………………………………………..…………………………...32

CHAPTER 4: RESULTS………………………………………………………………………...38

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………..……….39

REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………………..…41

BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………………..50





LIST OF GLOSSES



DAT dative case

PSProsodic structure

F features

CO contour

C1 contour

C2 contour

C3 contour

ST stress































LIST OF TABLES

Table 1:Yes or No questions…………………………………………………………….23

Table2: Alternative questions……………………………………………………………24

Table3: W/h questions………………………………………………………...…………24

Table4: Tag questions……………………………………………………………….…..28

	Table5:Corpus of interrogative sentences………………………………………………29

	Table6: Corpus of interrogative sentences…………………………………………...….29

	            Table 7:Corpus of interrogative sentences…………………………………………...….30

	

































LIST OF FIGURES

	Figure 1. Monitoring in real time with WinPitch………………………………………………..27

	Figure 2. Functions………………………………………………………………………………27

	Figure 3:Maximal speech rate………………………………………………………………..…28

Figure 4:Spectogram…………………………………………………………………………….34

Figure 5: Contour of sentences…………………………………………………………………35

Figure 6:  Contour of sentences………………………………………………………………...36

Figure 7: The structure of Yakut interrogative sentences………………………………………37



































CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

Purpose

This thesis investigates the prosody of interrogative sentences in Yakut language. Analyzed collection of utterances spoken "interrogative sentence" by 4 speakers and use 23 interrogative sentences of 92 audio files. The purpose of the studies has been to identify the intonation patterns in the framework of the prosodic structure in interrogative sentence of Yakut language based on the intonation contours and in the analyzed data.

We analyzed Yakut interrogative sentences.  Then the research questions and issues are stated to outline the aim and, subsequently, the objectives of the research, which will be worked out in the rest of this work. Perception of prosody structure by Yakut native speakers is a promising subject of investigation this language is typologically different in their lexical prosody Yakut stress in organization of questions. Analisisof the communication features of interrogative sentences, their specificity  today, is an important part of language. Analyzing the functioning of interrogative constructions in interrogative sentences - there was made an attempt to differentiate the varieties on the example of the Yakut speakers. In particular, the role and significance of interrogative sentences were revealed. Also there was revealed the specifics of his presumptive,interrogative sentences. Sentences that ask a question are called interrogative sentences. They’re easy to spot -they always end with a question mark (?). 

Yakut, also known as Sakha is a Turkic language with around 450,000 native speakers spoken in the Sakha Republic in the Russian Federation by the Yakuts. Like most Turkic languages and their ancestral Proto-Turkic, Yakut is an agglutinative language and employs vowel harmony.

Yakut is a member of the Northern Turkic family of languages, which includes Shor, Tuvan, and Dolgan in addition to Yakut. Like Turkish, Yakut has vowel harmony, is agglutinative and has no grammatical gender. Word order is usually subject-object-verb. Yakut has been influenced by Tungusic and Mongolian languages. (Forsyth, James 1994: 56). 

Yakut first appeared in writing in 1692 as part of a book by the traveller N. Witsen and published in Amsterdam. 

The first literary work in Yakut Reminiscences by A. Y. Uvarovsky and its German translation was published in 1851 as a part of Otto N. B?htlingk's work About the Yakut language, 

B?htlingk used an alphabet based on Cyrillic with some special characters.

The Yakut language is characterized by a final stress (always falling on the last syllable but not always for all words), which is not related to diphthongs and long vowels. 

Along with this, our investigation was mainly based on the works and arguments by P. Martin. He defined the concept of prosodic events, isolated in melodic contours.  Melodic contours are distinguished and dependent on each other (contours of the main tone) and, finally, determines the prosodic structure. 

Philippe Martin introduces the notion of prosodic events defined by the pitch contour movements. In this notion, the remarkable pitch movements on stressed syllables defining the accent phrases are the sequences of syllables with one stressed syllable. Another event of the melodic movements (pitch contours) define a dependency to the right towards another contour of higher rank and finally define a prosodic structure (	Ph. Martin 2008 "Phon?tiqueacoustique", A. Colin, Paris, 163p.).

Considering the above stated issues and questions, the general research aim is to study the prosody of interrogative sentences in Yakut language and prosodic model.

Analysis of interrogative sentences, their specificity today is important because the ability to ask questions is a critical component.

Our dissertation is devoted to describing the following purposes and tasks:  

1) Theoretical analyses of the existent, scientific literature devoted to problem the prosody of interrogative sentences. 

2) Collection of interrogative sentences from Yakut languages;

3) The analysis using the speech in software, which implies the processing of the input data, and the interpretation of the parameters defined by the program. 

4) Present of the results of experiment, provided by the program.

The practical value of the work. 

The current dissertation paper can be used as a material for the phonetic courses. The analyses of intonation component's functions will serve for increasing the efficiency of the teaching speaking and listening skills. 

The theoretical value of thesis. The theoretical materials that were deeply studied puts its contribution to the further development of phonetics. 

Thus, the work describes the specific features of the intonational nature the prosody of interrogative sentences in Yakut language, which gives a specific linguistic material.

The results of this study can serve as a theoretical guide for describing the prosody of interrogative sentences in Yakut language.



Organization

The thesis is built up as follows. In this introductory chapter, the current state and problem areas of the prosody interrogative sentences in Yakut language are discussed.  

Then the research questions and issues are stated to outline the aim and, subsequently, the objectives of the research, which will be worked out in the rest of this work.  Chapter Two is devoted to the literature review. This chapter will cover definition of prosody and interrogative sentences in Yakut language. 

It is mainly presented by the literature overview and is divided into two parts, of which, the first addresses the earlier fundamental works on the prosodic structure.

 In Chapter 3 the corpora, or the sets of speech recordings used in this thesis and the used tools will be covered. The results of the analysis, conducted in the Chapter 3 will be discussed in the Chapter 4, leading to some typological considerations. And finally the conclusion, which sums up the conducted work, is presented in Chapter 5.





















CHAPTER 2. Backgrounds and literature

2.1. Overview of theoretical literature 

UP to now, very few studies have deeply analyzed the phonology of the Yakut language. We can cite some recent works relating to the lexical tone and to the prosody of the sentence. 

 Presented that the assertive sentence is marked with a low register whereas the interrogative sentence has a high register. Moreover, made the report that, on the intonation contour level, a descending slope does not always correspond to interrogative sentence. On the duration level, the interrogative statements have a faster rhythm than the assertive and injunctive ones, although the difference in duration between the two last is not significant.As for the intensity level, it is generally stronger in the interrogative sentence, and the intensity of the final syllables is often more significant than the other syllables of the sentence.

 Based on these reports, we wish to further determine the prosodic differences between interrogative sentences. For this purpose, we built a specific corpus made up of interrogative sentences. The two sentences of one pair have the same tonal context and the same number of syllables. The choice of identical tones enables us to eliminate the influence from the syllable tones on the general intonation of the sentence, and to control the micro-variations of the intonation. Furthermore, to also eliminate all the phenomena of co-articulation, which could interfere with our prosodic (Hajicov?, 1984, p. 193). 

Recent work in linguistics has focused on the relationship between phonology and syntax (Ferreira 1991, 1993, Gee &Grosjean 1983, Hayes 1989, Inkelas&Zec 1990, Kaisse 1985, Nespor& Vogel 1986, Selkirk 1986). Prosodic structures are influenced by syntactic structures, but comprise hierarchical arrangements of prosodic units, such as syllable, foot, prosodic word, and phonological phrase. Prosodic is the name given to the study of these prosodic phonology units and their structural relations.

This forms the basis of the rendering of the segmental durations and the fundamental frequency’s contour or the selection of the appropriate units in corpus based synthesis. The description of the prosodic structure is usually defined by the position and the type of (a) prosodic phrase breaks, (b) pitch accents, (c) phrase accents and (d) boundary tones. The last two are usually grouped together (they do not co-occur in the tone tier) and referred as end tones. Two approaches are usually followed for the identification of the above elements in an utterance: rule-driven and machine learning. The former fails to capture all the richness of human speech, is generally difficult to write and to adapt to new domains and usually provides poor input to the prosody generation module, while the latter can yield reasonable results if the size of the sample data increases with the size of the domain of the application. Prosody generation is a complex process that involves the analysis of several linguistic phenomena (Ph. Martin (2008) "Phon?tique acoustique", A. Colin, Paris, 163p).

Relations of dependency:

To characterize the properties of the prosodic structures we will need a set of 4 dependency relations: 

A -> B   A depends of B on the right, A selects B on its right, B precedes A;  

A <- B   B depends on A on the left, A is selected by B on its right, A precedes B;   

A – B   A and B are independent from each other; A can occur without the presence of B, B can occur without the presence of A;  

A <-> B   A and B are symmetrically dependent, A cannot occur without the presence of B and B cannot occur without the presence of A. 

In the syntactic structure, A and B stand for minimal units such as lexemes, or syntactic groups as SN or SV; in the prosodic structure, A and B represent minimal prosodic units or stress groups. A prosodic word, minimal unit of prosody organized hierarchically by the prosodic structure, contains one and only one lexical stress. It is also called a stress group. A clear understanding of stress assignment rule in Yakut language is thus pivotal in the discussion on prosodic structure (Ph. Martin (2009) "Intonation du fran?ais", A. Colin, Paris, 256p).

Intonation model: any linguistic role for intonation.

An intonation model is an instantiation of a hypothetical-deductive process. To illustrate this, let’s start with the simple and well-known correlation existing between intonation and the sentence modality.  The sentence establishes a specific relationship between the speakers and the other participants of the speech act. This relationship, called the modality, can be a priori classified according to various grids and classes, from the simplest involving declaration and interrogation, to more complex ones involving subtle degrees of social relationship, of speech act context, etc. In most in not all languages, various markers, syntactic, morphologic, as well as the tone of voice indicate sentence modality.  

We can then expect to discover some significant differences between the two melodic contours correlated with these modalities, differences manifested by prosodic data. To find out which are the features involved, we must turn to experimental data. If we are not willing or capable to distinguish and qualify these differences by ear, we can then ask for the help of modern technology, i.e. to the acoustical analysis of the sentence, which should reveal quickly where the differences are. At this point, we introduce an important constraint in our way to look at the data. We will would extract from acoustical fundamental frequency, intensity and duration only segments corresponding to (effectively) stressed syllables. Those parameters have been shown for a long time to be encoding stress in most languages, and stressed syllables are the key feature of a unit introduced later, the prosodic word. In fact, stress is central as always present even when the sentence is reduced to a minimal form with a sequence of syllables containing one stress, or just one syllable, necessarily stressed. 

The sentence (i.e. here the phrase, or text, associated with the prosody, or tune) is not produced in a vacuum, but rather in a specific context (all the information contained in sentences produced earlier) and a specific situation (Chafe, 1976; Prince, 1986)

This section provides a phonological comparison of prosodic organization in Yakut language and the place of pitch accents in the prosodic systems of this language. A comparison that adopts the same theoretical framework and transcription conventions facilitates a better understanding of differences between the systems, and as relevant to the goals of this dissertation, possible challenges that second-language.

Perception of the prosody structure by Yakut researches is a promising subject of investigation because Yakut language are typologically different in their lexical prosody and in the role lexical prosody plays in prosodic organization of speech.  





















2.2. Prosodic structure



Intonational tunes are regarded as strings of pitch accents and edge tones (Pierrehumbert 1980, Taylor 2000), but apart from that tunes have hierarchical constituent structure (Ladd 1996:204). The most important part is the nucleus – pitch accent associated with the most prominent stressed syllable that belongs usually to the last content word of an utterance. Nucleus constitutes an obligatory and the most important element of any prosodic structure. 

The idea of nucleus has been incorporated into various theories of prosodic structure beginning with (Palmer 1922) where tunes consist of three components: head (prenuclear part of the tune), nucleus and tail (including postnuclear accents). In later works (see: Ladd 1996:209) head is defined as a sequence of syllables starting at the major stressed syllable, whereas preceding part of a tune is considered as a prehead. In the IPO model (t’Hart, Collier & Cohen 1990) a distinction is drawn between three components of different structural roles in the tune, i.e. prefix (which corresponds to head), root (? nucleus) and suffix (? tail). At a nuclear position a number of specific pitch movements can occur - they determine the shape of the postnuclear contour.

 The prenuclear part is independent from the nuclear pitch accent, but some combinations of prenuclear and nuclear accents are more common than others. In (Ladd 1996:208) it is said that all prenuclear accents in a tune must be of the same type (i.e., must belong to the same tonal category). As shown in the examples (1) and (2) in sec. 2.1.3 modifications in the prenuclear part of the tune (i.e., different number of accents resulting from association with different texts, different types of prenuclear pitch accents) do not affect the basic linguistic meaning conveyed by nucleus (e.g.  statement or interrogation), but adds some intonational nuance to that meaning (Ladd 1996:208).  

In the Pierrehumbert system (Pierrehumbert 1980) the idea of a structural difference between prenuclear and nuclear accents was rejected and nucleus was considered solely as the last pitch accent that occurs in an intonational phrase. The nuclear melody is determined by the pattern associated with nuclear pitch accent and phrase accent and\or boundary tone. There is also no place for the tail in the intonational tune structure, because pitch movements that follow the nucleus are attributed to the phrase accent/boundary tone.

Pierrehumbert's model makes also other assumptions concerning constituent structure of tunes, namely that “there is a hierarchy of prosodic domain types such, that in a prosodic tree any domain at a given level of the hierarchy consists exclusively of domains at the next lower level of the hierarchy” (after Ladd 1996:238). This approach is referred to as strict layer hypothesis. It assumes that prosodic domains are nonrecursive, i.e. in a prosodic tree no constituent can dominate a constituent at the same level (e.g.  an intonational phrase can not include another intonational phrase). However, consider the example below (from Ladd 1996:242): 

(A) Warren is a stronger campaigner, and (B) Ryan has more popular policies, but  (C) Allen has a lot more money.  

It can be said that the cohesion is greater between phrases (A) and (B) than (B) and (C), because there is a conjunction between the former and opposition between the latter. Therefore, it can be expected that the prosodic boundary is stronger between (B) and (C) than between (A) and (B). There exist a number of acoustic cues (e.g.  duration, range of the pitch movement, see sec. 2.2.2 and 6.1.1) which signal different boundary strength and cohesion between intonational phrases. As proved in a number of studies (e.g.  Horne, Strangert&Heldner 1995, Carlson &Swerts 2003) these differences are perceptually significant. The strict layer hypothesis as defined above does not give an opportunity to reflect this phenomenon, and the three intonational phrases in (1) would be represented as equal nodes of some higher level prosodic domain, which is not really the case (see Figure 7a). The prosodic structure of the utterance in (1) can be represented by the tree in (b) below. 



2.3. Intonation

The information conveyed by a sentence is expressed not only by proper words and grammar structures, but also by intonation. The term intonation implies variations of pitch, force of utterance and tempo. Variations of pitch are produced by significant moves of the voice up and down. The force, component of intonation is measured by the degree of loudness of syllables that determines the prominence of words. The tempo is determined by the rate of speech and the length of pauses.

Intonation is based on its two functions: the constitutive function, the distinctive function.

The Constitutive Function. Intonation forms sentences. Each sentence consists of one or more intonation groups.

An intonation group is a word or a group of words characterized by a certain intonation pattern and is generally complete from the point of view of meaning, eg: He's nearly sixty. (As a - matter of fact | he's - nearly sixty).

Intonation is defined as a complex, a whole, formed by significant variations of pitch, loudness and tempo (the rate of speech and pausation) closely related. 

The syllable is widely recognized to be the smallest prosodic unit. It has no meaning of its own, but it is significant for constituting hierarchically higher prosodic units. 

The succession of syllables forms a rhythmic unit - either one stressed syllable or a stressed syllable with many unstressed ones grouped around it. 

In the intonation group not only stresses, but pitch and duration (i.e. intonation in the broad sense) play a role. Structurally the intonation group has some obligatory formal characteristics. These are the nuclear stress on the semantically most important word and the terminal tone. 

The utterance is the main communicative unit. It is characterized by semantic entity which is expressed by all the language means: lexical, grammatical and prosodic. The prosodic structure of an utterance is a meaningful unit that contributes to the total meaning of the utterance. 

The supraphaphrasal unity is a totality of information groups or utterances, united by general subtopic and common intonation key. 

Each component of intonation can be described as a system. 

Pitch is described as a system of tones (Fall, Rise, Fall-Rise and so on), pitch levels (keys), which can be high, medium and low, and pitch ranges (wide, medium and narrow). 

Loudness is described as normal, increased (forte) or low (piano). 

Tempo includes rate of speech and pausation. The rate of speech can be normal, slow and fast. Pauses are classified according to their length, their position in the utterance (final – nonfinal) and their function (syntactic, emphatic and hesitation pauses). (Beckman, M. and Pierrehumbert, J. (1986), 255-309).

Performing its distinctive function intonation can differentiate the syntactic (communicative) types of sentences, attitudinal meanings, the actual meaning of sentences. 

Intonation serves to structure the text. On the one hand, it delimitates the text into smaller units, on the other hand, it ties together smaller units into bigger ones. 

Intonation conveys the information content of an utterance. It highlights the most important information in an utterance and helps to distinguish which information is new (the rheme) and which information is known to the listener (the theme). 

According to the grammatical approach to the study of intonation the main unit of intonation is a clause. Intonation is a complex of three systemic variables: tonality, tonicity and tone, which are connected with grammatical categories. Tonality marks the beginning and the end of a tone-group. Tonicity marks the focal point of each tone-group. Tones can be primary and secondary. They convey the attitude of the speaker.

In linguistics, intonation is variation of spoken pitch that is not used to distinguish words; instead it is used for a range of functions such as indicating the attitudes and emotions of the speaker, signalling the difference between statements and questions, and between different types of question, focusing attention on important elements of the spoken message and also helping to regulate conversational interaction. It contrasts with tone, in which pitch variation in some languages does distinguish words, either lexically or grammatically. Although intonation is primarily a matter of pitch variation, it is important to be aware that functions attributed to intonation such as the expression of attitudes and emotions, or highlighting aspects of grammatical structure, almost always involve concomitant variation in other prosodic features (Jump up Wells, John (2006). English Intonation. Cambridge. pp. 116–124).

Intonation models can be grouped with respect to features listed below.  

The level of analysis and representation for description of intonation. On the basis of this factor a distinction is drawn between phonetic and phonological models. In between the phonetics and phonology an intermediate level of surface-phonology is proposed (Hirst, Di Cristo &Espesser 2000). 

The way in which tunes are modeled gives rise to the distinction between superpositional and sequential models. In the former tunes result from superposition of two components of a different temporal scope i.e., phrase and accent components. The latter regard tunes as sequences of discrete elements (pitch accents, boundary tones, connections) which are associated with the elements of the segmental string.  

 The direction in which analysis of intonation is carried out: a distinction is drawn between generative and analytical models. In general, the generative approach involves a top down process in which f0 contours are produced from higher-level information. On the contrary, the analytical approach involves a bottom up process infers higher-level information from the f0 contour. 

The way in which coding of f0 contours into description of intonation is carried out gives rise to the distinction between data-driven and rule-based models. The former use various machine learning techniques (neural networks, regression trees) to generate f0 contours from the symbolic input. In the latter approach f0 contours are generated from rules defined by experts. 

In the following sections some basic theoretical assumptions underlying the models are present

The intonation pattern consists of one or more syllables of various pitch levels and bearing a larger or smaller degree of prominence. Those intonation patterns that contain a number of syllables consist of the following parts: the pre-head, the head, the nucleus and the tail. The pre-head includes unstressed and half-stressed syllables preceding the head. Thehead con­sists of the syllables beginning with the first stressed syllable up to the last stressed syllable. The last stressed syllable is called the nucleus. The unstressed and half-stressed syllables that follow the nucleus are called the tail. Thus in the example They don't 'make so much fuss about it. ('Then' is the pre-head, 'don't make so much' is the head, 'fuss' is the nucleus, 'about it', is the tai)l.

The changes of pitch that take place in the nucleus are called nuclear tones. The nuclear syllable is generally the most prominent one in the intonation pattern. The nucleus and the tail form the terminal tone. It is the most significant part of the intonation group.

The modification of the intonation pattern is also due to the speed of utterance and pausation. We must point out in conclusion that of the three components of the intonation pattern pitch is the most significant one.Timbre, a special colouring of human voice, is sometimes considered to be the fourth component of intonation. But as it has not been thoroughly investigated yet we shall exclude it from the description of intonation in this book(Jump up Roach, Peter (2009). English Phonetics and Phonology pp. 153–4).

The Distinctive Function. Intonation also serves to distinguish communicative types of sentences, the actual meaning of a sentence, the speaker's emotions or attitudes to the contents of the sentence, to the listener or to the topic of conversation. One and the same word sequence may express different meaning when pronounced with a different intonation pattern.

Intonation is a complex unity of non-segmental, or prosodic features of speech: 1. melody, pitch of the voice; 2. sentence stress; 3. temporal characteristics; 4. rhythm; 5. tamber (voice quality).

Intonation organizes a sentence, determines communicative types of sentences and clauses, divides sentences into intonation groups, gives prominence to words and phrases, expresses contrasts and attitudes.

Functions of intonation.

• Emotional function's most obvious role is to express attitudinal meaning -sarcasm, surprise, shock, anger, interest, and thousands of other semantic nuances.

• Grammatical f-n helps to identify grammatical structure in speech, performing a role similar to punctuation. 

• Informational f-n helps draw attention to what meaning is given and what is new in an utterance. The word carrying the most prominent tone in a contour signals the part of an utterance that the speaker is treating as new information.

• Textual f-n helps larger units of meaning than the sentence to contrast and cohere. In radio news-reading, paragraphs of information can be shaped through the use of pitch. In sports commentary, changes in prosody reflect the progress of the action.

• Psychological f-n helps us to organize speech into units that are easier to perceive and memorize. Most people would find a sequence of numbers, for example, difficult to recall. The task is made easier by using intonation to chunk the sequence into two units.

• Indexical f-n, along with other prosodic features, is an important marker of personal or social identity. Lawyers, preachers, newscasters, sports commentators, army sergeants, and several other occupations are readily identified through their distinctive prosody.

Intonational styles

Intonational style – a system of interrelated intonational means which is used in a social sphere and serves s definite aim of communication. 

Stylistic use of intonation: 

1) Informational - in press reporting, educational descriptive texts. May be represented in monologues, dialogues, polylogues. 

2) Academic (scientific)- style of lectures (conferences, seminars). It is determined by the purpose of communication as the speaker*s aim is to attract the listener*s attention, to establish close contacts with the audience and to direct the public attention to the message carried in the contents of the text. 

3) Publicistic (oratorial)-this term serves for many kinds of oratorial activities (especially this style uses in political speeches). 

4) Declamatory (artistic)- this is the style of declamation. This is a highly emotional and expressive intonational style that is why it needs special training. Attitudinal, volitional and intellectual functions of intonation are of primary importance here and serve to appeal to the mind, will and fee.......................